Microsoft’s Dan’l Lewin talks BizSpark at LeWeb

Anything Microsoft does is looked at through a prism cut from the glass of the company that Gates built. The days of the anti-trust trial, Hailstorm, and the browser wars may seem far away, but not for the Netscapes and Novells who foundered in the face of the Windows and Office steamroller. Yet refugees of those wars have reinvented themselves in the new world of the social network, most poignantly represented by Eric Schmidt and his third-times-the-charm Google. In the context of Google, a reinvigorated Apple, and the rise of cloud computing, Microsoft has figured out they have just as much of right to be reborn. Ray Ozzie's tenure at the company has been a kind of stealth startup transformation applied to the entrenched duchies of the old company, and it's bearing fruit in new language not often heard from Redmond: open, cross-platform, Mesh, Silverlight, Azure.